The case of David Vetter, the "Boy in the Bubble," caught imaginations in the 1970s. Vetter was born with a severe immune deficiency. He spend his early life in the hospital and then lived in a contained environment in his parents' home to protect him from all exposure to infectious disease. John Travolta starred in a TV movie about Vetter in 1976. Paul Simon's 1986 song "The Boy in the Bubble" refers to him briefly as well. Vetter was born in September 1971, so either Bates heard about him early, or he was inspired by some similar case earlier.
In this Cary Bates story, the bubble boy's immune system is dangerous to those around him; his white blood cells grow to monster-size and attack people. On the page at hand, our bubble boy is trying to sort out fiction from reality. Are TV characters real? He communicates with his parents via video phone technology that hadn't quite arrived in 1972. Curt Swan renders this device in a reasonable fashion, with both a camera and microphone atop the screen in roughly the position that people put webcams on their monitors today.
On the televison, Superman advertises "The Fresh Air Fund." Early 1970s DC comics often highlighted environmental and social themes. This seemed partly to reflect the activist interests of the creative teams, and partly to curry favor with a youth demographic that shared those interests.
The first panel deals with another pop culture phenomenon, the TV show "The Fugitive." More about this in the description of other pages in my collection.
